Love of Putin in Crimea navy town
"Sevastopol is a Russian town," yelled retiree Zinaida Lazereva, while a group of elderly ladies sang Soviet war songs nearby her on the city's main square.
"Here we speak Russian, we have a Russian mentality and we want to be in Russia," she told AFP, as military ships could be seen moored up in the bay below.
Perched on the southwestern tip of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, Sevastopol has been the home of the Russian navy's Black Sea fleet for some 250 years and a bastion of pro-Kremlin sentiment since the collapse of the Soviet Union saw it cut off from Moscow.
Now the town is a key chess piece in the spiralling tensions over the Russian-speaking Crimea, which has descended further and further into disarray since the ouster of Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych following an explosion of deadly protests.
While the West denounces what it sees as Moscow's creeping annexation of Crimea -- which was controlled by Russia until it was handed to the Ukrainian Soviet republic in 1954 -- as inexcusable aggression, in Sevastopol many seem to welcome any Russian intervention.
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